Archive for 2012

A month’s work since Milestone 1Â shows thatÂ the new Release Team are hitting their stride, as they have reviewed and checked in more than 470 updated packages, far more than early milestones in previous releases.

Desktops and apps

The biggest update is in LibreOffice, which jumps from 3.5.4 to 3.6.3. This new version of the office suite fixes a lot of annoying bugs and improves DOCX compatibility. Also this release includes a lot of new functionality, like adding the Lanczos image algorithm for resizing, which reduces aliasing in resized images. In Calc, there are several new functions, like support for color scales and data bars in XLSX and ODS document formats. Please check the release notesÂ for a full description of the main fixes and new features.

In a change to policy, KDE 4.10 Beta 2 has been added to Factory already. Usually only finished KDE releases are added, but since more KDE team developers are working on Factory, it made sense to perform early integration and testing in Factory now. So, if everything goes as planned, the final version of openSUSE will arrive in March including KDE 4.10.0 or 4.10.1 (expected in the first week of March). This new version of KDE increases the Qt Quick usage in Plasma Workspaces. In 4.10, additional desktop components are implemented using this declarative technology instead of C++ for greater stability and easier theming. Okular now uses less memory when zooming in on big PDFs, and a new indexer replaces the last Strigi components, allows faster and more reliable indexing of documents. You can expect much more functionality and bug fixingÂ in the final release of KDE 4.10.

Other KDE changes include kwebkitpart 1.3, which adds Access Key support, automatic scrolling and manual spell checking support for forms, as well as on demand plugin loading; and appmenu-qt joins the standard installation, allowing application menus to be shown at the top of the screen or in a menu button on the window border.

After a period of stabilization work, GNOME 3.6.3 found its way into this milestone. The GNOME interface for PackageKit is at version 3.6.1, which fixes a segfault error when a distribution upgrade is available. This GNOME version is better integrated with systemd, and has a new â€œAirplane Modeâ€, that switches off all radios, including Bluetooth.

Claws Mail has been updated to 3.9. This little GTK email client and news reader is known for being fast, extensible and easy to configure. It adds IMAP server side search, has several speed-ups and optimizations, a better GnuPG integration and more than thirty bug fixes.

Platform

The GNU C library was updated. glibc 2.17 improves ARM and multi-arch subsystems, and adds fixes for crypto bugs. DBUS 1.6.8 includes new service ownership rule possibilities, and many security, bugs, and performance fixes.

Another updated package is QEMU, which goes from 1.2.0 to 1.3.0. With QEMU we can easily create and run virtual machines. This new version improves Â live migrations of virtual machines. That means that we can now stop a virtual machine and continue the execution in another place without noticeable problems. QEMU 1.3.0 adds many newly virtualized devices and chipsets.

LLVM is one of those cool projects that everyone knows, but few can exactly say what it is. Fascinate Xmas parties with the knowledge that LLVM is a set of libraries that allow aggressive optimizations of a intermediate ad-hoc language (known as LLVM IR) and the compilation of this language to a specific architecture and processor. Clang is a C / C++ / Objective-C compiler that translate the high level language to this IR language, and is a really fast compiler. If this description interests you, then you’ll be pleased to know that M2 updates LLVM/Clang to 3.2rc2. This version of LLVM improves the Clang diagnostics, this means that we will have better error messages that explain more clearly what mistakes we are making. LLDB is the new command line debugger for LLVM/Clang. It uses the Clang parser for the C++ debugger. And there is a lot of new functionality in the optimizer, like a new high-level loop optimizer and the automatic parallelizer.

Mono 3 now has a complete C# 5.0 compiler, with all the async functionality enabled, and adds interesting optimizations in the garbage collector (mainly for SMP systems) and in the runtime library. This is a big version change, so may cause breakage with Mono 2.10 code.

This milestone comes with a 3.6 kernel, but don’t despair, packages for 3.7 are already cooking.

As of 23:00 UTC on 16 December, 2012, the openSUSE Project’s members completed the Fifth election of the openSUSE Board.Â At stake were two seats of the five electable seats.Â With 8 candidates, the community definitely had a broad choice of qualified candidates to choose from.

Schweikert, (robjo) respectively.Â They will join the openSUSE Board on January 9th during the transitional meeting of the regularly scheduled Project meeting heldon the Freenode IRC Channel at 17:00 UTC.

The Election Officials would like to congratulate all of thecandidates for a great campaign season.Â These candidates included Matt Barringer, Richard Brown, Carl Fletcher, Manu Gupta, Chuck Payne and Stefan Seyfried.Â All of these candidates demonstrated a commitment to the Project and exemplified the Guiding Principles which the Project, as a whole, is founded upon.

We join the rest of the community in looking forward to an exciting year to come as

Raymond Wooninck

the new Board embarks on new initiatives and directions.Â And we thank the community for giving us the opportunity to serve as members of the election committee.

We are very happy to inform you that next year’s openSUSE Conference (oSC13), the yearly get together of our community, will happen in July in the beautiful city of Thessaloniki, Greece. oSC13 will bring together a wide variety of Free and Open Source (FOSS) contributors to collaborate on one of the major Linux distribution projects. In exciting talks, workshops and social events our community will bring alive our motto “Have a lot of fun”.

We are entering the organization phase right now and have not yet settled on an exact date and location but we will let you know, right here on news.opensuse.org, once we have that info. In the meantime how about you help us organize oSC13?

We need you at the kick off meeting!

To make this the most awesome conference ever, we are looking for people who are willing to help out. We need you! There is a lot of organizing to be done, logos to be drawn, websites to be designed, schedules to be made, hotels to be booked, sponsors to be found and a million of other things you can help with. So to kick off the organization team and to get everyone on the same page we are going to meet this Thursday, December 13th on IRC to discuss what we need to do and how we are going to do it. If you’re looking for a chance to give back to the openSUSE community this is it!

Let’s get going and make oSC13 in Thessaloniki the best conference ever!

On 6 December, 2012, the 8 candidates standing for election of the 2013 openSUSE Board joined members of the community in an open Q&A Debate session on IRC.Â Â The complete log of that event can be found here.

Below is a summarization of the questions asked and answers given by various candidates.Â Each answer represents an aggregate of the candidate’s total answers during a specific quesstion session.Â To read in full flow context, we urge you to read the full log here.

The excitement has been building for weeks and now the most important phase of the openSUSE Board elections begins today — Election Time!

Two seats are open for election by members of the openSUSE Project.Â The first seat is vacated by Henne Vogelsang who has completed his two-term limit.Â The second seat isÂ currently held by Manu Gupta, appointed to fill in for Peter Linnel who stepped down in August of 2012.Â Both seats are for a two-year term that begins in January 2013 and ends inÂ January 2015.

How to Vote

If you are a current member of the openSUSE Project, you will receive an email with instructions on how to vote via openSUSE Connect polling system.Â You must be a member in good standing on or before 27 November 2012.Â If you have not yet received an email within the next 24 hours, please contact the Election Officials committee at election-officials@opensuse.org.

Each eligible voter will be given two votes to cast, one for each seat to be elected in this cycle.

Voting begins today and concludesÂ at 23:00 UTC on 16 December 2012.

But I can’t decide!

With 8 excellent candidates running for two seats, we feel your pain.Â Luckily, there’s two ways to learn more about the candidates.

Option 1:Â Platforms and Blogs

Option 2:Â Live Q&A Debate

Tomorrow, Thursday at 15:00 UTC (what’s my timezone?), candidates will gather in the #opensuse-project channel on Freenode IRC network.Â A two hour session, moderated by the Election Officials, this will be an opportunity for you to ask questions live .

Can’t make it, no problem.Â We will post transcript of the debate here and on the mailing lists.Â Got a question you want to ask but can’t make it?Â Post your question in the comment section below and we’ll make sure the question gets asked during the debate.

The openSUSE Travel Support Program aims to support contributors representing openSUSE at events, conferences and hack-fests with their travel and hotel costs. The program pays up to 80% of the travel and/or hotel costs for contributors who could not afford going to these events otherwise. In turn the contributors make a worthy contribution at the event and report back to the openSUSE community about what they did.

The Travel Committee also decides on travel support for openSUSE events like the openSUSE Conference and the openSUSE Summit.

Current Committee includes

Â Kostas Koudaras (ambassador event planning)

Â Izabel Valverde (finance & planning)

Â Agustin Benito Bethencourt (openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE)

Results

The Travel Support Team has till now sponsored various conferences including FOSDEM, Cerea Fair, Solutions Linux, COSCUP, Indiana Linux Fest, Linux Tag, SELF, Libre Office Graphic Meeting and loads of others. Along with this, the Travel Committee also handles sponsorship handling for openSUSE Summit and openSUSE Conference which in itself are very tedious tasks.

NumbersÂ

TSP : 15

Summit : Â 11

openSUSE Conference : 21

A total of 37 sponsorships were given out this year.

What we need you to do?

If you think you need a sponsorship, then APPLY For it. However there are a few rules, which you have to keep in mind. So if you are thinking of applying, have a look at here

The period for standing up for election to the 2013 openSUSE Board is now closed and the openSUSE Election Officials committee is proud to announce this year’s candidates.Â Please welcome the following candidates in alphabetical order:

What an exciting list of candidates, all extremely qualified to represent our community in the upcoming board.Â With just two open seats to be filled to begin a two-year term,Â Agustin Bethencourt, openSUSE Team Lead at SUSE,Â recently noted: “Interesting times are ahead and, In any possible scenario we are thinking of, the Board will play a key role.”

So What’s Next?

As defined in the previous announcement by the Election Officials, the remaining steps in this year’s election timeline are that the candidates shall begin officially campaigning henceforth.Â Balloting will begin on 5 December, 2012.

All eligible members of the openSUSE Project will be notified with the process for submitting their ballot to choose their two favorite candidates for the Board.Â Members will have up to 16 December, 2012 to vote.

Then, if all goes well, and we don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t, we’ll be announcing the winners of this year’s election on 17 December, 2012.

On Saturday, December 1st 2012, at approximately 05:00 UTC our data center team will do a backend storage upgrade. The planned window is 8-10 hours for the maintenance, and specific applications will probably be not available until 24:00 UTC as listed below.

Two weeks ago, openSUSE Ambassadors Ilias and Diomidis joined the SUSE crew at LinuxCon in Barcelona, Spain, to represent the Geeko to the visitors of this conference. As most ambassadors do, they wrote an excellent report about the event which we didn’t want you all to miss. To give you a taste of the event, Ilias send the report with the following comment: “it was an amazing experience for me and Diomidis.” Read on for more details! (more…)

This years openSUSE Election Committee is in the pleasant position to announce the 2012 Board elections[0].

The timeline we decided for this year election is the following:
November 13th (Phase 0)
– Announcement of the openSUSE Board election for 2012.
– Start of 2 week period to apply for an openSUSE membership (in order to vote).
– Start of 2 week phase to stand for a position in the openSUSE Board.

November 27th
– Notification of intent to run, and application for an openSUSE membership close (end of phase 0).

November 28th (Phase 1)
– Start of 1 week campaign for the candidates before the ballots open (campaign might be done until ballots close).

December 5th (Phase 2)
– Ballots open

December 16th
– Ballots close (end of phase 2)

December 17th
– Announcement of the results

So, if you want to participate in the openSUSE board and influence the future direction of the project please stand up and announce your candidacy. If you want to vote for the candidates, please make sure your openSUSE membership [1] is approved. If you are a contributor of openSUSE but you are not a member yet, apply for membership now[2] and be a part of the changes to come.

For the openSUSE Board will be 2 seats to be elected, each for a 2 year term.

If you have any questions about the election or the board’s tasks, please contact the election commitee (election-officials@opensuse.org) or the board (board@opensuse.org).